Cracking down on Big Tech: The drive behind the barrage of measures of EU’s digital acts

Driven by political motivations and the upcoming EU elections, European regulators have unleashed a storm of enforcement actions and investigations related to the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA), experts told Euractiv.

The Digital Services Act (DSA), effective from 17 February for all EU-operating platforms, regulates handling illegal and harmful online content. The Digital Markets Act (DMA), with a compliance deadline of 6 March, targets digital competition by designating gatekeepers to ensure fair competition in key internet sectors.

Since the start of the year, but especially in recent weeks, the European Commission has unleashed a flurry of actions zeroing in on big tech companies, implementing the two landmark tech laws.

Pornography sites were added to the “systemic risk” list under the DSA.

The Commission is in separate legal battles with Meta and TikTok over DSA fees.

Under the DSA, the Commission also launched a probe into TikTok, including possible breaches in child protection.

Apple saw a record fine for DMA compliance.

The Commission launched investigations into platforms like Google’s parent company Alphabet, Apple, and Meta, for anti-competitive behaviour, as well as AliExpress. The executive body also issued guidelines concerning digital threats to elections.

Asked about the surge of measures in recent weeks, a Commission spokesperson outlined how enforcement actions and investigations proceed a legislative act’s coming into force,  adding that they are subject to judicial review and confirming that enforcement powers for the DSA have been given to Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton.

“The political steer can indeed be given by Commissioner Breton, but this is something usual that you can see in other areas such as competition law,” the spokesperson said.

Political pressure

Julian Jaursch, project director at Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, a German think tank that works on digital technologies, politics, and society, said he could “imagine there’s a lot of political pressure from the top of the Commission, especially from Commissioner Thierry Breton” about the enforcement of the DSA.

Breton’s strong advocacy for the DSA is evident in his interactions with CEOs and public statements, which influence enforcement efforts at lower levels, Jaursch said.

Margrethe Vestager, the Commission’s executive vice president, is also understood to be working hard to pass measures in the last months of her term. Vestager returned to the Commission in December after withdrawing her candidacy for the presidency of the European Investment Bank.

Public statements by Commission officials during the early stages of DSA enforcement indicated their desire to become active fast, said Jaursch. “It’s a fine line the Commission has to walk here: The new rules do need to be enforced and regulators can’t be complacent”.

“At the same time, acting too fast or overstretching resources and staff can backfire,” he said.

DSA and elections

The June European Parliament elections serve as a clear and definitive milestone for the DSA, prompting swift action from policymakers, said Lazar Radic, a senior scholar for competition policy at the International Center for Law & Economics and adjunct professor of law at IE University, told Euractiv.

He warned, however, that there remains ambiguity in the DSA in defining what constitutes misinformation.

“There is also the question of censorship and the threat of the DSA becoming a tool for not suppressing misinformation but perpetuating biases or misinformation,” he said.

Radic suggested that the Commission’s guidelines on elections are intended to clarify these definitions, particularly regarding misinformation ahead of the June elections.

Jaursch said that the election guidelines were announced very fast and remains sceptical about the DSA’s impact on this year’s elections. He brought up TikTok’s and Meta’s guidelines, which partially match the Commission’s.

The director at Stiftung Neue Verantwortung said he appreciated the Commission’s efforts but believed that the short notice – two months before the EU elections – may make it challenging to fully gauge the impact.

DMA and competition

In March, the Commission held a series of “workshops” to assess DMA compliance with the so-called gatekeepers: Apple, Alphabet, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta, Amazon, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, and Microsoft.

The workshops were touted as an opportunity for the big tech firms to outline their DMA compliance measures.

Shortly after the workshops, the Commission announced investigations into Alphabet, Apple, and Meta’s non-compliance with the DMA.

“This was immediately after the workshop [which] was supposed to foster communication between the Commission and the gatekeepers. I and others have been scratching our heads. What was the point of this?” said Radic.

He said the Commission had likely had investigations planned before the workshops. The Commission might have hoped the gatekeepers would address previously identified concerns during the workshops, but the probes may have been decided regardless of the workshop outcomes, the scholar said.

Radic added that there might also be “a disciplinary element to [the measures]. The Commission wants to signal that it’s serious.”

“The Commission keeps saying that competition law and DMA are completely different things. But here we have yet another example of that continuum between the two,” he said. “In fact, the two are deployed at the same exact time.”

Final test

Radic said that the DMA was presented as a self-enforcing regulation, a notion he challenged: “How is it self-enforcing if the Commission is now, [in] the first month, launching these investigations?”

He also questioned how the Commission would measure the adequacy of changes made by gatekeepers to achieve the DMA’s goals of fairness and contestability.

The “final test” for the DMA’s success, according to Radic, is “whether competitors’ market shares go up”. This might be what the act means by “fairness”, he added.

[Edited by Eliza Gkritsi/Zoran Radosavljevic]

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